Monday, 11 December 2006

Snagged by SnagIt

After coming up with the wacky theme for my submission I created the plane in AutoCAD and then a PowerPoint to tell the story. I could have submitted those alone but it seemed like something more was needed. Camtasia came to the rescue as it enabled all the elements to be combined and presented in a single package conveying the idea far better than “static” presentation files.

Betsy was kind enough to give me Camtasia 4 & SnagIt 8 licences to get me up to speed with the latest versions. I’ve been using Camtasia for a couple of years and was aware of SnagIt but never bothered to try it. The main reason was I already used a screen capture utility that is part of Corel Graphics so why bother with another…

It didn’t take long using SnagIt to realise I was wrong in thinking there’d be little difference. A capture is a capture but the difference with SnagIt is how well integrated the processing and use of that capture is once complete. You can add effects, call-outs and various other frills but then it’s time to get that screen-shot to the intended application.

This is where SnagIt 8 shines as in addition to the usual Clipboard, Email, File Save and FTP transfer methods it features application “Accessories”. These have specific capabilities to transfer the screen-shot to the target application. Word, Excel & PowerPoint accessories are installed by default but you can also download others including Flickr and my favourite, shown in action below, MindManager.

This allows a capture to be added to a MindManager Map in the various content forms that MindManager supports for images: Main Topic, Sub-Topic, Floating Topic, Call-out, or Notes. As seen below, once the capture is complete transfer to any of these options is just a click away. It the application isn’t running SnagIt will launch it, if open with multiple documents you can choose the target. Very slick!

Comments

After coming up with the wacky theme for my submission I created the plane in AutoCAD and then a PowerPoint to tell the story. I could have submitted those alone but it seemed like something more was needed. Camtasia came to the rescue as it enabled all the elements to be combined and presented in a single package conveying the idea far better than “static” presentation files.

Betsy was kind enough to give me Camtasia 4 & SnagIt 8 licences to get me up to speed with the latest versions. I’ve been using Camtasia for a couple of years and was aware of SnagIt but never bothered to try it. The main reason was I already used a screen capture utility that is part of Corel Graphics so why bother with another…

It didn’t take long using SnagIt to realise I was wrong in thinking there’d be little difference. A capture is a capture but the difference with SnagIt is how well integrated the processing and use of that capture is once complete. You can add effects, call-outs and various other frills but then it’s time to get that screen-shot to the intended application.

This is where SnagIt 8 shines as in addition to the usual Clipboard, Email, File Save and FTP transfer methods it features application “Accessories”. These have specific capabilities to transfer the screen-shot to the target application. Word, Excel & PowerPoint accessories are installed by default but you can also download others including Flickr and my favourite, shown in action below, MindManager.

This allows a capture to be added to a MindManager Map in the various content forms that MindManager supports for images: Main Topic, Sub-Topic, Floating Topic, Call-out, or Notes. As seen below, once the capture is complete transfer to any of these options is just a click away. It the application isn’t running SnagIt will launch it, if open with multiple documents you can choose the target. Very slick!